Do They Contribute to Social Mobility? C Rajagopalan Jaspal Singh The llTs were intended to be a kind of model institution designed to play a leading role in promoting engineering and technological education. This paper presents an analysis of the social background of the First-Year students at one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), The data presented in this paper were collected through personal interviews, employing a formal interview schedule, of 237 students who represented 86.5 per cent of the total admissions in 1966 in the Indian Institute of Technology under study.